Yann Martel Quotes

I said nothing. It wasn't for fear of angering Mr. Kumar. I was more afraid that in a few words thrown out he might destroy something that I loved.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.

[T]o be a castaway is to be caught up in grim and exhausting opposites.

Most of us get our history through story.

The reward for the watching eye and listening ear is great.

He was a man whose profession it was to love, and he would offer comfort and guidance to the best of his ability. I

It's not right that gentleness meet horror.

... nature as a whole was an exceptionally fine illustration of science.

Cinema is incredibly concise.

In art, something comes of nothing. Out of the thin air and the ether, you create a story. And that is intensely satisfying.

He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

Don't worry about being good ... . Aspire to be authentic.

My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness
how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

I would nearly go into convulsions of dismay at my stupidity.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we - in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?

There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

I went to temple at crowded times when Brahmins were too distracted to come between me and God.

A problem of the soul, a heaviness of the heart, a darkness of the conscience

Christianity is a religion in a rush.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

communion with God in the middle of bags of flour

There people fail to realise that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. - Pi Patel in Life of Pi

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The sky was black and spitting rain on my smiling face.

We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.

My alarm clock during my childhood was a pride of lions.

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.

Life and death live and die in exactly the same spot, the body. It is from there that both babies and cancers are born.

wild are, in practice,

You can get used to anything - haven't I already said that? Isn't that what all survivors say?

Reality escapes us. It's beyond description, even a simple pear. Time eats everything.

I turned around, stepped over the Zebra and threw myself overboard.

You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!

But I want to pray to Allah. I want to be a Christian.

Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgment that comes down heavily.

Christianity stretches back through the ages, but in essence it exists only at one time: right now.

At last I managed to haul it aboard. It was over three feet long. The bucket was useless. It would fit the dorado like a hat.

To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity.

And I survived because I made a point of forgetting.

Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love.

If you take two steps towards God,' he used to tell me, 'God runs to you!

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

We are all born like Catholics ... in limbo, without religion.

I'm more preoccupied with furnishing my head than the place where I live. The most beautiful rooms I have entered have been empty ones.

He often repeated something Father Abrahan said to him once, how faith is ever young, how faith, unlike the rest of us, does not age.

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.

Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu, how good to see you Richard Parker!

I must go the washroom. I've shaken a lot of hands.

We believe what we see.
So did Columbus. What do you do when you're in the dark?

Truth is a nebulous thing. There are certain, definite truths, but the truth of our lives goes far beyond facts.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.

A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.

I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.

Loneliness comes up to him like a sniffing dog. It circles him insistently. He waves it away, but it refuses to leave him alone.

Mamaji remembered, Father dreamed.

I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I have to turn miracle into routine.

I'm looking at a dead event and trying to give it new life. In a sense, I'm a taxidermist.

Can there be any happiness greater than the happiness of salvation?

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness.

Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals

Words are much better at relating emotions and thoughts.

Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology.

I am not an autobiographical writer.

In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and to do too little.

Within the limits of their nature, they make do with what they have.

Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilerated speechlessness.

Bapu Gandhi said, 'All religions are true.' I just want to love God.

The presence of God is the finest of rewards.

My life is like a memento more painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

I blinked deliberately, expecting my eyelids to act like lumberjacks. But the trees would not fall.

Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don't like.

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

I love Canada ... It is a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos.

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to fictitious address.

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

Fanatics do not have faith - they have belief. With faith you let go. You trust. Whereas with belief you cling.

It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

I don't know then. I wrote my book on the Holocaust without worrying about where the fucking bar code would go.

Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

Without a driver this bus is lost.

Nevertheless, an Olympic pool is an Olympic pool, touched by immortal glory.

Tiptoe to the water's edge. They show their raiments.

It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

A house is a compressed territory where our basic needs can be fulfilled close by and safely.

If I didn't have children, I think my life would be a failure.

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.